2899 
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THE BRITISH ACADEMY 



FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 



' What to expect of Shakespeare ' 



By 
J. J. Jusserand 



New York 
Oxford University Press, American Branch 

35 West 32nd Street 
London: Henry Frowde 



THE BRITISH ACADEMY 



FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 



4 What to expect of Shakespeare' 



By 

J. J. Jusserand 



New York 
Oxford University Press, American Branch 

3o West 32nd Street 
London : Henry Frowde 



t^^ ? 



*i 



Copyright in the United States of America 

by the Oxford University Press 

American Branch 

1911 






©CU300395 



FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 



WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE' 

By J. J. JUSSERAND 
July 5, 1911 

It was the custom in former days that any one who addressed the 
French Academy for the first time should praise the great Cardinal, 
founder of that august body, and should compliment the king. 

If similar customs prevailed in the British Academy, nothing 
would be easier for me than to comply with them. I should have to 
praise, I believe, as the 'begetter' of this new and already famous 
Assembly, the Royal Society; and to praise it as it deserves, it is 
enough to recall that it numbered among its Fellows, in its early days 
Newton, in its latter days Darwin. 

No less easy and no less congenial would it be for me to compli- 
ment that Sailor-Prince, who reverently walked, a few days ago, to 
the foot of the altar in the Abbey where so many of his ancestors 
sleep their last sleep, and their great shades still keep watch over the 
nation. To him, the worthy inheritor of their best examples, have 
been handed down, with the crown, the traditions of a father whose 
ideal was peace with honour and with justice, and of a grandmother 
to whom it was given to break one of the oldest historical traditions 
of the British realm: the tradition that there could be no long 
English reign without a war with France. Hers was the first excep- 
tion in eight centuries. May a foreign visitor be permitted to 
express the wish that the new reign, lasting as long as any that has 
gone before, shall transform the exception into the rule. 

Addressing Queen Elizabeth in a year that is now famous, the 
year 1564, in which Shakespeare was born, Ronsard, speaking in the 
name of his then storm-ridden country, expressed that faith in its 

f2 



4 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

future which, at no period, has any French heart ever lost, adding 
that if it were possible to once join in a firm amity, 

' Vostre Angleterre avecques nostre France,' 

the Golden Age would return. If the Golden Age has not quite 
returned up to now, the cause is perhaps that the experiment has not 
yet been continued long enough. May it be long continued! 

The theme assigned me by you is one which not even the boldest 
minds, the best informed, the most accessible to poetical beauty, dare 
approach without awe. Encouragement may, however, be taken from 
no less ardent a worshipper of the Shakespearian fame than Swin- 
burne. ' For two hundred years at least,' did he write, ' have students 
of every kind put forth in every sort of boat, on a longer or a shorter 
voyage of research across the waters of that unsounded sea (the works 
of Shakespeare). From the paltriest fishing craft to such majestic 
galleys as were steered by Coleridge and by Goethe, each division of 
the fleet has done or has essayed its turn of work.' 

For an occasion like the present no galley could be too great 
or too majestic. If it pleased you to select the merest fishing craft, 
the reason must be that, to come to you, it had to cross the ocean, 
and this doubtless humoured the fancy of a sporting nation. As 
soon, however, as your invitation reached me, I accepted it, thinking 
that the best courtesy was not to discuss but to obey, and considering 
that, for lack of better motives, my coining from the lands further 
away than 'vexed Bermoothes' was an homage I could offer which 
was not within the reach of many of my betters. 



When Ronsard died at St. Cosme, near Tours, in December, 1585, 
Shakespeare being then twenty-one, all France went into mourning; 
besides the ceremonies at St. Cosme, solemn obsequies were celebrated 
at Paris, orations were delivered in French and in Latin by Cardinal 
Duperron and others; the crowd was such that princes and magnates 
had to be denied admission for lack of space; not one poet of note 
failed to express his sorrow for the national loss; these elegies were 
collected under the title of Le Tombeau cle Ronsard. 

On April 25, 1616, the bell of Holy Trinity Church at Stratford 
tolled, as we read in the register, for 'William Shakespeare, Gentle- 
man,' one of the chief men of the town, wealthy, good humoured, 



' WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE' .5 

benevolent, known to have been somebody in the capital, and to have 
written very successful plays. A monument was raised to him with 
a florid inscription, such as is often granted to provincial celebrities. 
It was in fact a local event. 'No longer mourn for me,' the poet 
had written, 'when I am dead,' 

Then you shall hear the surly sullen bell 
Give warning to the world that I am fled 
From this vile world. 

But the world knew nothing of it; the British capital paid no atten- 
tion to it; not one line was written on the occasion, no poet mourned 
the event. 'At the passing of the greatest Elizabethan the Muse 
shed not one tear.' i When his plays were collected seven years after 
his death, they were preceded by a few eulogies, the authors whereof 
extolled his merits, but they went much beyond what they really 
thought, for they had to conform to the rules of the genre. The 
friends and fellow players of the author, who had edited the collection, 
apologetically offered 'these trifles' to two noblemen who had been 
pleased to think them 'something heretofore.' A second edition was 
only wanted nine years after the first, and a third only thirty-one 
years after the second. 

What we see now needs no description. With the single exception 
of the Bible, no book has been in the same space of time the subject 
of such close studies and such ardent comments as the collection of 
'trifles' first given to the world by Heminge and Condell in 1623. 
During the first five years of the present century twenty-seven new 
editions of Shakespeare's works were published; princes have played 
in his tragedies the part of princes, kings have tried their hands at 
translating his works. Some of his dramas have been played in 
Japanese; his Julius Caesar has been performed in the Roman theatre 
at Orange. His ideas, his sayings, the personages to whom he has 
given life, the scenes he has depicted, have become familiar to all; 
men born at the Antipodes will catch an allusion to a scene, a 
character, a word of Shakespeare's. By the middle of the last century 
the British Museum counted some three hundred entries under the 
word Shakespeare; it counts now more than five thousand. 

A responsibility uncourted and unexpected by him weighs now on 
the poet. Books, like their authors, have their biography. They live 
their own lives. Some behave like honourable citizens of the world 
of thought, do good, propagate sound views, strengthen heart and 
courage, assuage, console, improve those men to whose hearths they 

1 Munro, The Skakspere Allusion Book, I. xiv. 



6 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

have been invited. Others corrupt or debase, or else turn minds 
towards empty frivolities. In proportion to their fame, and to the 
degree of their perenniality is the good or evil that they do from 
century to century, eternal benefactors of mankind or deathless male- 
factors. Posted on the road followed by humanity, they help or 
destroy the passers-by; they deserve gratitude eternal, or levy the 
toll of some of our life's blood, leaving us weaker; highwaymen or 
good Samaritans. Some make themselves heard at once and continue 
to be listened to for ever; others fill the ears for one or two genera- 
tions, and then begin an endless sleep; or, on the contrary, long 
silent or misunderstood, they awake from their torpor, and astonished 
mankind discovers with surprise long-concealed treasures like those 
trodden upon by the unwary visitor of unexplored ruins. No works 
are so familiar to the nations of the world as those of Shakespeare 
to-day. In their continued and increasing existence what sort of life 
are they leading? 

In the course of ages, while praise and admiration were becoming 
boundless, an anxious note has been sounded from time to time, the 
more striking that it came from admirers. Two examples will be 
enough to make the point clear. While stating that 'the stream of 
time, which is continually washing the dissoluble fabrics of other 
poets, passes without injury by the adamant of Shakespeare,' Dr. 
Johnson, who wanted his very dictionary to be morally useful through 
the examples selected by him for each word, stated that Shakespeare's 
'first defect is that to which may be imputed most of the evils in 
books or in men. He sacrifices virtue to convenience, and is so much 
more careful to please than to instruct that he seems to write without 
any moral purpose ... It is always a writer's duty to make the 
world better.' 

Nearer our time, another, no enemy like Tolstoi, but a passionate 
admirer, Emerson, for whom Shakespeare was not a poet, but the 
poet, the 'representative' poet, wrote: 'And now, how stands the 
account of man with this bard and benefactor, when in solitude, 
shutting our ears to the reverberations of his fame, we seek to strike 
the balance? Solitude has austere lessons. . . . He converted the 
elements, which waited on his command, into entertainments. He 
was master of the revels to mankind. ... As long as the question is 
of talent and mental power, the world of men has not his equal to 
show. But when the question is to life, and its materials, and its 
auxiliaries, how does it profit me? What does it signify? It is but 
a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer-Night's Dream, or a Winter Eve- 
ning's Tale: what signifies another picture more or less? ' 



'WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE 1 

So spoke Emerson in one of those Essays which Matthew Arnold 
went so far as to describe as 'the most important work done in 
English prose in his century.' 

What is it then that we possess? What can we expect of Shake- 
speare? Is the treasure in this bewitching garden of Hesperides 
mere glitter, or is it real gold? Do we listen to the seer that can 
solve our problems, answer our doubts, instruct our ignorance, soften 
our hearts, brace our courage? Or does the great book whose fame 
fills the world offer us mere revels, vain dreams and tales, no moral 
purpose, virtue sacrificed to convenience, such evanescent food as was 
served on Prospero's table for the unworthy? 



II 

Shortly after he had reached his majority Shakespeare came to 
London, very poor, having received but a grammar-school education, 
upheld by no protectors. The son of a tradesman, he reached the 
huge capital where one of his Stratford compatriots was established 
as a grocer, another as a printer. For some years he disappears, and 
when we hear of him again he is beginning to be known as an 
author. Having come to the city with no trade of his own, he had 
obviously soon discovered that he was better fitted to write plays 
than to sell groceries, and to compose books than to print them. 
He was apparently still in Stratford in 1585-6; six years later 
London dramatists are feeling jealous of the new play-mender or 
maker, five years after that he is a wealthy man, and purchases New 
Place, the finest house in Stratford, built by its most famous citizen, 
a former Lord Mayor of London. He was then thirty-three. 
Promptitude is the salient trait of such a career. When he died 
Shakespeare left thirty-seven plays; Racine only twelve. 

Literary invention has been the subject in our days of minute 
research on the part of philosophers. Paulhan has shown what 
different roads lead to that supreme result, a memorable book of 
lasting fame. One road passes through the Elysian fields, another 
crosses the region made doleful by Tantalus, Ixion, and Sisyphus's 
ceaseless groans. For that modern dramatist Dumas fils the labour 
of literary composition was accompanied, according to Binet and 
Passy, by 'a great feeling of pleasure. While he writes he is in a 
better humour, he eats, drinks, and sleeps more; he feels a kind of 



8 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

physical enjoyment through the exercising of a physical function 
. . . Page after page in his manuscripts is without any erasure.' ' 
Others, like Rousseau, or Flaubert, had a different tale to tell: 'My 
ideas,' wrote Rousseau, 'group themselves in my head with the most 
incredible difficulty : they move about obscurely, they ferment to the 
extent of upsetting me and giving me heart-beats, and in the midst 
of all that emotion I see nothing clearly; I could not write a single 
word, I must wait.' The same with Flaubert: 'I am in a rage 
without knowing why: my novel, maybe, is the cause. It does not 
come, all goes wrong; I am more tired than if I had mountains to 
bear; at times I could weep. ... I have spent four hours without 
being able to write a phrase. . . . Oh, Art, Art, what is that mad 
chimera that bites our heart, and why?' 

To the latter group most decidedly belongs Shakespeare's great 
rival, Ben Jonson. One must 'labour,' said he sententiously; one 
must be 'laboured'; facility is the most dangerous of the Will-o'-the- 
wisps; it leads to bogs and marshes; do not follow Jack-o'-lanterns, 
bright as may be the lanterns; retrace your steps, 'The safest is to 
return to our judgement and handle over again those things the 
easiness of which might make them justly suspected.' 

To the first class undoubtedly belonged Shakespeare. The number 
of his plays and the brief interval between the composition of each, 
two or three plays a year being his average production during the 
first eight years of his authorship, show that he must have written 
with the 'fine frenzy' attributed by his own Theseus to the gifted 
ones, flying 'an eagle flight, bold and forth on,' like the poet in his 
own Timon. 'My manuscripts,' said Rousseau, 'are scratched, 
blotted, besmeared, illegible, testifying to the trouble they have 
given me.' Of Shakespeare, as is well known, his fellow players, who 
had seen him at work, said: 'What he thought he uttered with that 
easiness that we have scarce received from him a blot in his papers.' 
'He never blotted out a line,' grumbled Jonson; 'would he had 
blotted a thousand!' 

But he had other ways, and rather followed, to quote him again, 
his own 'free drift.' Why take so much trouble, when what he 
himself expected of his own plays could be reached without any of 
those Ixion-like agonies described by Rousseau and the others? For 
what he expected was simple enough, plain enough, and near at 
hand. What he expected he did actually attain, and his life was a 
successful life. His eye was on Stratford, not on posterity. His 

1 Anw'e Psychologique, 1894, I. 79, 80. 



WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE' it 

dream was to end his days a well-to-do, respected citizen in his native 
town, and that dream was fulfilled. The idea of his being held later 
the Merlin of unborn times, the revealer of the unknown, the leader 
of men of thought and feeling, the life-giver, the pride of his country, 
never occurred to him, and would probably have made him laugh. 
His allusions to literary immortality in the Sonnets were only a way 
of speaking, which he had in common with the merest sonnet 
scribblers, as was well shown by Sir Sidney Lee; and since he never 
printed his, he cannot have cared much for an everlasting fame to be 
secured through them. For his poems proper he took some trouble; 
he published them; they were works of art; for his plays, a secondary 
genre in the common estimation, and in his, he took none; they were 
things of no import. He never printed any; a garbled text of some 
of the best was given, he did not care; silly plays were published 
under his name, he did not protest; he left no authentic text in 
view of a posterity which had never been in his thoughts; no books 
are mentioned in his will. 



Ill 

Literary fame as a dramatist troubled him not; but present neces- 
sities could not be forgotten; chief among them the necessity of 
pleasing his public. His average public, the one he had chiefly in 
view, whose average heart and mind he had to touch and delight, was 
that of the Globe, a large, much-frequented house which drew popular 
audiences, and where accidentally some Ambassador might appear; but 
the fate of the play would depend not upon the Ambassador's applause 
or some learned critic's blame, but on the impression of the crowd : a 
boisterous crowd, warm-hearted, full-blooded, of unbounded patriot- 
ism, a lover of extremes, now relishing the sight of tortures, now 
moved at the death of a fly, a lover of the improbable, of unexpected 
changes, of coarse buffooneries, quibbles, common witticisms easy to 
understand, of loud noises of any sort, bells, trumpets, cannon; men. 
all of them, of an encyclopaedic ignorance. 

The part of such a public, as a contributor to Shakespeare's plays, 
can scarcely be over-estimated — a real contributor to whom it seems at 
times as if Shakespeare had passed on the pen to scribble as it pleased, 
or the chalk to draw sketches on the wall. What such people would 
like, and what they would tolerate, is what gave those plays which he 
never thought of after the performance, the unique, the marvellous, 

p3 



10 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

the portentous shape in which we find them. Great is the de facto 
responsibility of such a public; great that of Shakespeare too for 
having never denied it anything;' great rather would that have been 
if he had not purposely intended to please only those living men, 
assembled in his theatre, on whom his own fortune depended; 'For 
we,' even Dr. Johnson had to acknowledge, 

JFor we that live to please, must please'to live. 

From the writing of his plays, however, Shakespeare expected not 
one thing but two; first, immediate success with his public, and all 
that depended on it; second, the pleasant, happy, delightful satis- 
faction of a function of his brain duly exercised. This for us is the 
chief thing, what saved him in spite of himself: to the coarse food 
his groundlings wanted he added the ethereal food which has been 
for ages the relish of the greatest in mankind, while it had proved 
quite acceptable to his groundlings too. He added this as a super- 
erogatory element because it was in him to do so, because it gave 
him no more trouble than to put in quibbles, jokes, or massacres, 
and because experience had shown him that, while it was not at all 
necessary to success, it did not hurt, and was received with a good 
grace. It was for him the exercise of a natural function, as it is for 
a good tree to produce good fruit. 

Hence the strange nature of that work, touching all extremes, the 
model of all that should be aimed at, and of much that should be 
avoided; of actual use both ways. Prompt writing, as he had no 
choice (he had to live), the courting of a public whose acceptance of his 
work was indispensable, explain, with his prodigious, heaven-bestowed 
genius, how the best and the worst go together hand in hand in his 
plays, those flashes of a light that will never fade, and those concessions 
to the popular taste (indecencies, brutalities, mystifications, tortures, 
coarse jokes, over- well-explained complications), or the advantage so 
often taken by him of the fact that the public will not know, will not 
remember, will not mind. 'He omits,' says Dr. Johnson, 'opportu- 
nities of instructing or delighting which the train of his story seems to 
force upon him' : the reason being that, in some cases, such opportuni- 
ties did not occur to him at once and that he had little time for recon- 
sidering; given his public, that would do. Hence also his anachronisms, 
his faulty geography, his indifference to real facts, so complete that 
he would not have stretched out his hand to take a book and verify 
the place of a city or the date of an event, nor would he have asked 
his future son-in-law whether a human being that has been smothered 
can still speak. He offers to his groundlings, and not to this learned 



WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE' 11 

age of which he never thought and which has no right to complain, a 
reign of King John without 'Magna Charta,' but with plenty of gun- 
powder and with a Duke of Austria who was dead before the play 
begins. He adopts, for convenience sake, two rules to which none of 
his hearers could be tempted to object; one is, that all antique per- 
sonages having lived in antiquity are, generally speaking, contem- 
poraries and can quote one another, so Hector quotes Aristotle, 
Menenius talks of Alexander and of Galen, Titus Lartius compares 
Cor'olanus to Cato. The other rule is that all distant towns are by 
the seaside. Rome, Florence, Milan, Mantua, Padua, Verona (to say 
nothing of Bohemia) are by the seaside. His personages go by sea 
from Padua to Pisa, from Verona to Milan; about to start from 
Verona they wait for the tide. Why take trouble? He wrote only 
for men who neither knew nor cared, composing plays not meant to 
survive and which had two authors, Shakespeare and the motley crew 
at the Globe. 



IV 

They have survived, however; their hold on the world increases as 
years pass, they are famous in regions the very name of which was 
unknown to their author. In the calm of our study, in the corner of 
a railway carriage, on the deck of a ship, we open the book and read 
the first scene of any play : Prospero's magic works on us; we are his, 
ready to follow him anywhere, to feel and believe as he tells us. The 
sight once seen, the words once heard, so impress themselves on our 
mind that the mere name of the place, of the man, woman, or child 
cannot be pronounced henceforth without the grand and lovely land- 
scape, the loving, hating, laughing, weeping personage from the plays, 
and with him all that pertains to him, his family, his enemy, his 
friend, his house, his dog, appearing to us in as vivid a light as if he 
were here alive again, and we were pacing with him the terraces at 
Elsinore, the moonlit garden of the Capulets, the storm-ridden, witch- 
haunted heath of Lear or Macbeth, the woods near Athens, the forum 
at Rome, the enchanted park for an enchantress at Belmont, or 
the real battlefields where, in bloody conflict, France and England 
were shaping their destinies. So much life, such an intensity of 
realization are in the plays, that it is difficult to visit, in actual life, 
any of those places which Shakespeare sometimes merely named and 



12 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

did not describe, without the Shakespearian hero first appearing to us, 
before even we think of the real men famous there in times past. 
Grand or sweet figures, lovers whom death will sweep away, or leaders 
of armies, anxious Hamlet, scornful Coriolanus, loving Romeo, pensive 
Brutus, irrepressible Falstaff, and those daffodils of man's eternal 
spring — Portia, Rosalind, Ophelia, Juliet, Desdemona — rise bewitch- 
ing, terrible, or laughable, at the mere sound of the words Elsinore, 
Eastcheap, Arden, Verona, Cyprus. So long as the mirage lasts our 
lives seem merged into theirs. Between the true artist and the pro- 
duct of his brain the phenomenon is a frequent one, but between the 
product of his brain and the readers of the book it much more rarely 
happens: 'A delightful thing it is,' said Flaubert in one of his rare 
happy moods, ' to write, to be no longer oneself, but to move through 
the whole creation one has called forth. To-day, for example, man 
and woman together, lover and mistress at the same time, I have 
ridden in a forest, during an autumnal afternoon, under yellow 
leaves; and I was the horses, the leaves, the wind, the words that 
were said, and the red sun that caused them to half close their eye- 
lids bathed in love.' This privilege of the author, Shakespeare, for 
better, for worse, imparts to his listener or reader. 

For better or for worse? Some of his worshippers, thereby courting 
protest and inviting injustice of an opposite sort, have dogmatized on 
his perfections, his omniscience, his prescience, the safe guidance he 
offers in every possible trouble, and the unimpeachable solution he 
propounds for every difficulty. 

Wiser it is perhaps to acknowledge at once, with due deference to 
the purest intentions, that it is not exactly so. More than one of the 
gravest questions that, from the beginning, have troubled mankind 
would be put in vain to the poet, for to them he has no answer. 
What he does is to place the problem before us with such force that 
he obliges us to think seriously of those serious questions; hence of 
use, though of a different use than is sometimes said. 

Concerning religions he does not take sides; as is evidenced by the 
fact that discussions are still renewed now and then (though there 
is little room for doubt) as to what faith he belonged to. The lesson 
he gives us is, however, a great one; it was a rare one in his day; 
and it is summed up in the word 'toleration.' 

No problem is put oftener and more vividly before his audience 
than that of death and of the hereafter. To this he has no answer. 
In their calmest moods his personages hope for sleep : ' Our little life 
is rounded with a sleep.' Oftener he and they (he in the sonnets, 
they in the plays) pore over the prospect of physical dissolution, when 



WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE' IS 

the time shall come to leave 'this vile world, with vilest worms to 
dwell.' It seems as if for him as an author the apologue of the 
sparrow, told to King Eadwine by one of his Northumbrian chiefs, 
had been told in vain. We still 'go we know not where,' and no 
Isabella, be she almost a nun, and bound by her part in the play to act 
as a consoler, has any word to clear her brother's doubts or ours. 
The attitude of Shakespeare, the writer, is that of the awe-inspiring 
genius whom Saint-Gaudens seated in Rock Creek cemetery, not of 
the one who carries upwards, from earth to heaven, the sacred flame 
of life in Bartholomews monument. 

As a patriot his teachings are mixed ones. Patriotism has two 
sides: it concerns our own country considered in itself, then our 
country considered in relation to others. The first kind of duty, the 
most natural and easiest, is admirably fulfilled by the warm-hearted, 
the sound, and thorough Englishman that the poet was, justly proud 
of the great deeds of glorious ancestors. His love is expressed in 
admirable lines for this ' dear, dear land ' : — 

This precious stone set in the silver sea, 

that pale, that white-fac'd shore 
Whose foot spurns back the ocean's roaring, 
And coops from other lands her islanders. 

As to the other side of patriotism, Shakespeare writes not only as a 
man of his day, but as a man who had to echo his public's feelings : an 
echo can make no change. To understand that, to picture the van- 
quished as a huge crew of cowards, traitors, and scoundrels, afraid of 
their own shadow, was not to increase the glory of a victory, proved 
beyond the reasoning capacity of the crowd at the Globe. The poet 
allows them to have their own way, to hold his pen, and write in his 
plays their own views of what an enemy must have been. They were 
his only care; unborn posterity and exacting critics that would come 
to life long after the plays were dead, as he thought, could have on 
him no influence. 

On those great social problems which, in this modern world of ours, 
fill so much space in the thoughts of all, Shakespeare again expresses 
himself w T ith the force and pregnancy of a man of incomparable 
genius; but he speaks as a man of his time and of his milieu, not 
as a man above them. The foibles of the masses, their credulity, 
their fickleness, their alternate fits of enthusiasm and depression, 
their aptitude to cruelty, their inability to understand, are depicted 
with the stern accuracy of a clear-eyed, unfriendly observer. The 



14 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

counterpart of such vices, or the extenuating circumstances resulting 
from involuntary ignorance, hardship, and misery are scarcely visible 
anywhere. The people, throughout the plays, are the same people, 
with the same faults, be they the Romans of Coriolanus or of Caesar, 
or the English of Jack Cade, or even the Danes of Hamlet (with their 
selection of Laertes for a king) ; they are the people. Shakespeare no 
more hesitates to offer them to the laugh and scorn of their brethren 
in the pit, than to-day's playwrights hesitate to ask a middle-class 
audience to laugh at the faults and folly of middle-class personages. 
The poet's lesson may be of use to statesmen, scarcely to the people 
themselves, since for a useful castigation the most valuable factor 
is love. 

On one more question of keen, though less general, interest, we would 
appeal in vain to Shakespeare the playwright; that is for information 
about himself. Few men (I know that contrary views have been 
eloquently defended) have allowed less of their personality to appear 
in works dealing so directly with the human passions. Shakespeare's 
personality was .of the least obtrusive; except in Stratford where he 
wanted to be, and succeeded in being, a personage, his natural dis- 
position was to keep aloof. This general tendency is revealed by all 
we know about him. In an age and a milieu of quarrels, fights, 
literary and other disputes, he avoids all chances of coming to the 
front. 'His works,' said Dr. Johnson, 'support no opinion with argu- 
ment, nor supply any faction with invectives.' The exceedingly 
curious discoveries of Prof. Wallace show us Shakespeare unwittingly 
thrown by events into a quarrel; his efforts to minimize his role and 
to withdraw and disappear are the most conspicuous trait in the new- 
found documents. The very reverse of his friend Jonson, who courted 
quarrels and shouted his opinion on all problems and all people, he 
carefully avoided every cause of trouble. As we know, he neither 
printed his dramas nor claimed or denied the authorship of any 
play; no writer in his day published his poems without laudatory 
lines from his friends; Shakespeare, keeping apart, never gave or 
requested any. 

On rare occasions his persistence in expressing again and again 
certain views or feelings, or the casual inappropriateness of his per- 
sonages' saying what they say, leave us no doubt that he adored music, 
loved the land of his birth, did not trust the mob, knew what a clas- 
sical play was, objected to child-players, &c. These are exceptional 
occasions. The change we notice in the tone of his plays, as years 
pass, rather follows the curve of human life, of a life that might 
be almost any man's, than reveals individual peculiarities in their 



WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE' 15 

author. One of his chief characteristics (and merits) is, on the 
contrary, the free play he allows to his heroes' personality, and his 
care not to encumber them with his own. They go forth, fill the 
stage, fill the drama with their explanations and apologies, so freely, so 
unimpeded by the author, who seems simply to listen, that the spec- 
tator will at times remain in doubt which to believe and which to 
love. They pay no heed to Shakespeare, and they expound or con- 
tradict their maker's opinion without even knowing which. They are 
created independent and alive; they continue so to-day, the very 
reverse of so many characters in Hugo's dramas, mere spokesmen 
of the poet who wanted to imitate Shakespeare, but forgot to conceal, 
as his model had done, his own figure behind the scenes. 

The Sonnets confirm these views; there alone Shakespeare's per- 
sonality is, in a large measure, bared to the eye. But there the 
personage whose turn had come to speak was William Shakespeare, 
who used the same freedom that he had allowed to Shylock, Hamlet, 
Henry V, or Richard III. For him it was a kind of safety-valve, 
giving vent to sentiments which would have been out of place any- 
where else; but it was enough for him to have put them down in 
writing; he did not go the length of sending the sonnets to the 
press. 

V 

Far above any of those single questions rises the one of general 
import, propounded by Dr. Johnson, Emerson, and others: that of 
the moral effect of the plays on listeners or readers. 

During the whole period to which Shakespeare belongs, and before 
his day too and long after, in his country and out of it, most men 
agreed that plays must moralize and improve mankind. They have 
other raisons d'etre, but this is the chief one. Tragedy and 
comedy, said Ronsard, are above all, ' didascaliques et enseignantes.' 
Sir Philip Sidney was of the same opinion. The true poet, said Ben 
Jonson, must be 'able to inform young men to all good discipline, 
inflame grown men to all great virtues, keep old men in their best 
and supreme state,' and he deplored the debasement of that sacred 
role among his contemporaries, especially in dramatic poetry. 
According to Corneille the chief point is to paint virtue and vice just 
as they are; 'and then,' said he, with his austere optimism, 'virtue is 
sure to win all hearts even in misery, and vice is sure to be hated even 
triumphant.' 'The stage,' said Racine, 'should be a school where 
virtue would be taught no less than in the schools of philosophy.' 



16 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

Samual Johnson wrote his ill-fated Irene to show (but it turned out 
that no one wanted to see) 'how heaven supports the virtuous mind 
. . . what anguish racks the guilty breasts,' and 'that peace from 
innocence must flow'; while Voltaire, for reasons of his own it is true, 
placed, in his Babouc, the moralizing influence of tragedies far above 
that of sermons. 

The only shackles Shakespeare was loaded with were the needs and 
tastes of his public. They were heavy enough, but they were the only 
ones. The absence of others is so complete and so unique that this 
characteristic is among the most singular offered to our wonder by his 
works. Barring this single exception, no poet cast on the wide world 
a freer and clearer gaze. He wrote unhampered by traditions, rules, 
religious systems. He gave himself the pleasure of showing once that 
he knew dramatic rules existed, but he left them alone because they 
were ' caviare to the general,' and he depended on ' the general.' They 
were probably, besides, not so very sweet to him either. The final re- 
sult is that, strange as it may seem, he stands much nearer Aristotle 
than many of Aristotle's learned followers. The great philosopher 
did nothing but sum up the teachings of good sense and adapt them 
to Greek manners. The great poet did nothing but follow the same 
teachings, as given him by his own sound nature, and adapt them 
to English wants. As both were men of genius and both were 
excellent observers, the one taught and the other acted in similar 
fashion. 

On the question of morality, Aristotle makes it quite evident that 
his own ideal is a drama in which vice is punished or even has no 
place; but he clearly states also that the rational end of dramatic 
poetry is not to moralize but to give pleasure fads ySovijv). 

On the same question, as on that of ' rules ' (mere suggestions, not 
'rules' in Aristotle's intentions), Shakespeare's attitude was the 
same. He would not go out of his way either to secure or to avoid 
an ethical conclusion or conformity to rules. His plays were truly 
written 'without any moral purpose,' that is, instruction was not 
their object. But to conclude that they do not therefore instruct 
at all is to wander from truth. First, in some plays the events 
represented are, as in real life, so full of meaning that the moral is 
no less obvious than in any classical tragedy with a confidant or 
a chorus to tell us what to think; and even, at times, the hero tells 
us that. No one can escape the lesson to be drawn from the fate 
of Macbeth, of Coriolanus, of Antony, of poor Falstaff and his wild 
companions. Augustus in Cinna does not moralize with greater 
effect on his past than does Macbeth : 



WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE' 17 

Better be with the dead 
Whom we, to gain our place, have sent to peace, 
Than on the torture of the mind to lie 
In restless ecstasy. 

In many cases, however, it seems as if the evil power so often at play 
in (ireek tragedies, and in real life too, were leading the innocent to 
their destruction: Othello, Desdemona, Hamlet, as worthy of pity as 
Oedipus; fatality imposing on them tasks for which nature has not 
armed them, or offering them temptations to which they would not 
have yielded had they been less generous. Are those plays of no 
moral use, or is their use limited to those maxims and pregnant say- 
ings which Corneille considered one of the chief causes of a tragedy's 
usefulness, and which abound in Shakespeare — - 

'Tis time to fear when tyrants seem to kiss. 

Great men may jest with Saints; 'tis wit in them, 
But in the less, foul profanation — 

and others so well known that one scarcely dares to quote them? 

One instinct, and only one, appears in man at his birth, that of con- 
servation. The child eats, sleeps, does what care for his growth 
commands, and can no more think of anything else than a tree can 
think of whether its roots absorb sap that ought to have gone to the 
next tree. What happens later is of immense interest: if too much 
of that native instinct persists and more than is strictly necessary for 
preservation survives, then the misshapen being solidifies into a low, 
mean, dry-hearted egoist. To call him with Stirner an 'egotheist' 
{Homo sibi Deus), to deify the monster, is only to make him more 
monstrous, and go back to the time when stones were deities. Hearts 
must open. 'The aim,' Lord Morley has written with truth, 'both 
in public and private life, is to secure to the utmost possible extent 
the victory of the social feeling over self-love, or Altruism over 
Egoism.' The chief influences will be inherited tendencies, family 
tuition, early examples. Next to that will be what and whom the 
growing man sees, hears, reads, associates with. 

For compelling hearts to expand, and making us feel for others 
than ourselves, for breaking the crust of inborn egoism, Shake- 
speare has, among playwrights, no equal. Here works that supreme 
power of his: to bestow life, full and real life, on whomsoever he 
pleases, to delineate character with so great a perfection that such 
people as he presents to us we know thoroughly, and what happens 
to them strikes us the more since they are of our acquaintance; not 



18 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

a passing acquaintance, casually made, soon forgotten, but that of 
men who will accompany us through life, ever reappearing on the 
slightest occasion or merest allusion, in tears or smiles, moving us at 
the remembrance of a happiness and of disasters in which we take 
part though they be not ours. The action on the heart is the more 
telling that, with his wide sympathies, the poet discovers the sacred 
'touch of nature' not only in great heroes, but in the humblest ones; 
not only in ideal heroines, but in a Shylock whom we pity, at times, 
to the point of not liking so completely the 'learned Doctor from 
Padua'; even in 'the poor beetle that we tread upon,' and we get 
thinking of its pangs 'as great as when a giant dies.' 

The fate of a Hamlet, an Ophelia, a Desdemona, an Othello, carries, 
to be sure, no concrete moral with it; the noblest, the purest, the 
most generous, sink into the dark abyss after agonizing tortures, and 
one can scarcely imagine what, being human, they should have 
avoided to escape their misery. Their story was undoubtedly written 
'without any moral purpose,' but not without any moral effect. It 
obliges human hearts to melt, it teaches them pity. 



VI 

Five thousand two hundred and sixteen entries to-day in the 
British Museum under the word Shakespeare (more than double 
the amount for Homer), against three hundred and seven in 1855; 
all the world reading Shakespeare: moral cannot be the only 
attraction, nor even the chief one. It is, in fact, as things of beauty 
that the works of the poet have reached their immense fame. That 
they are things of beauty is now admitted by all; with enthusiasm 
by most people, unwittingly by the rare others. Such a great writer 
as Tolstoi denies any merit, even of the lowest order, to Shakespeare, 
but having to define, in his book On Art, the tests by which 'real 
art' is to be distinguished from 'vain imitations,' those he selects fit 
the works of Shakespeare so perfectly that, if this poet had been 
the typical one he had in view, he could scarcely have written 
otherwise. 

Shakespeare's plays are things of beauty, works of art; the product 
of an art, it is true, which cannot be learned in books — the higher for 
that. What is then the use of a thing of beauty, an As You Like It, 
a Midsummer Night's Dream, full of smiles? and all that gaiety, and 
all that beauty, and all those passions, and that force, and that wit, 
and that eloquence, and that wisdom scattered through the immense 



'WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE' 19 

field of the thirty-seven plays? 'What does it signify?' What 
should we expect of a thing of beauty? 

No problem has been, for over a hundred years, more passionately 
discussed. Can art be profitable at all? Should it be profitable? 
Should it profit the few or the many? Is real art of a supra terrestrial 
nature or not, and must it be kept above the reach and even the 
gaze of the lowly? 

On these questions most critics have known no doubts, and they 
have answered without hesitation; but some have said, Certainly yes, 
and others, Certainly no. 'Woe,' wrote d'Alembert, 'to the artistic 
productions whose beauty is only for artists.' 'Here,' observed the 
Goncourt brothers, 'is one of the silliest things that was ever said.' 
The problem continues debated and debatable, and was quite recently 
the subject of a remarkable essay by one of the best Shakespearian 
critics: Poetry for Poetry's Sake, by Professor Bradley. 

In the course of the last century the quarrel was at its height, and 
it was a fierce one. For a time no vocabulary had words strong 
enough to express the contempt, the hatred, the indignation of artists 
towards those unspeakable bourgeois who could imagine that art 
might be enjoyed by any but a select few, and could be of any use: 
'Everything that is of any use is ugly,' Thtophile Gautier had 
decreed. The true artist must live apart, meditate, never teach, 
never act: action might spoil the fineness of his perceptions. He 
belongs to a world different from everybody else's, the world of art. 

But while literary wars and revolutions were going on, other wars 
and other revolutions were taking place in the world and deeply 
influencing art theories. The revolution of 1848 made of Baudelaire, 
that staunch champion of 'art for art,' a convert to the opposite 
doctrine: 'Art is henceforth inseparable from usefulness and morality,' 
said he, burning what he had adored. The storm of 1870 thinned 
yet more the ranks of the erstwhile triumphant partisans of supra- 
terrestrial art. No doubt was possible, Browning was right, 

The world and life's too big to pass for a dream. 

Since the din and dust of the fight have abated one can get a 
clearer vision of the facts; and as is often the case in human quarrels, 
one now discovers valuable truths, though in different proportions, in 
the doctrine of the contending parties. 

The day of the pure dilettanti saying to the world, ' I am too much 
above thee to care for thee,' ' is decidedly on the wane. Boutroux, 
with his usual acumen and sanity, has shown that their views, attitude, 
1 Cassagne* L'Art pour I'art, p. 143. 



20 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

and success had never been a sign of progress, but of decay : ' In the 
epochs usually called epochs of decadence or dissolution, art disdain- 
fully dissociates itself from any other object but beauty, considering 
that the latter displays its full power only when free from all acces- 
sory ends such as utility, truth, honesty, and is placed alone in 
its supreme independence and dignity.' Art is, in fact, an offspring 
of nature; it is of course in close alliance with beauty, but it must 
not be cut loose from the soil under pretence of mere beauty: 'Each 
time art has risen again from decay or has been born to a new life, it 
has begun by casting off vain ornaments and assigning to itself a 
serious and real end, closely connected with the conditions of con- 
temporary life.' 

But there is something true also in the theory of ' art for art. ' If 
it cannot be maintained with Hegel, that art purines all it touches, 
and that any kind of art is morally beneficial to mankind, it must be 
acknowledged to-day that art, when not wilfully perverse, is useful 
simply because it produces things of beauty. 'All that is great,' 
Goethe said, 'contributes to our education.' A tragedy, a picture, 
a statue; Othello, Rembrandt's philosopher, the Victory of Samo- 
thrace, raise us above ourselves. We cannot enjoy works of art, Paul 
Gaul tier has observed, without 'a preliminary forgetting of our 
habitual preoccupations, and of the interested views which form, so 
to say, the woof of our lives. . . . They free us from the tyranny of 
interest. . . . The emotion caused by works of art acts like a 
preface to moral activity.' The same author adds with great truth: 
' The morality of a work is not to be measured by the morality of the 
things represented, but by that of the sentiment in which they have 
been represented.' 

The influence thus exerted will be powerful and beneficial, in pro- 
portion to the perfection of the work, the depth of the emotion, and 
the sincerity of the artist who takes his starting-point on our real 
earth, allowing himself to be prompted by our real lives and our 
real doubts and hopes. The influence will be broad in proportion to 
the accessibility of the beauty represented. Without those character- 
istics the kind of art that may grow will be short-lived, cold, and dry, 
the cult will not spread — few will worship nowadays a wooden idol. 

Of the former sort is Shakespeare's influence on mankind. The 
world is full of beauty, but with our eyes drawn to the daily task most 
of it escapes us. We want the poet, the musician, the artist, to touch 
us with his wand and to say to us, Look. Then we see and admire 
what we had looked at a hundred times before, and never seen, owing 
to our ' muddy vesture of decay. ' 



WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE' 21 

A sunset may pass unobserved by the vulgar; it will less easily 
pass unobserved when arrested in its evanescence and fixed on his 
canvas by Claude Lorrain. For to the landscape is superadded 
Claude Lorrain; we have the landscape plus he; the artist changes 
nothing in what he sees, but he is present there with us, just to say, 
Look. The same with Shakespeare. 

No sensible man visits that temple devoted to artistic beauty, with 
its innumerable recesses and shrines, where all epochs and all countries 
are represented, the Louvre in Paris, without leaving it a better man. 
The added worth may be an infinitesimal worth, it may be a con- 
siderable one; in all cases some worth will be acquired. Dormant 
springs of disinterested emotion will have been made to flow again, 
a fatigued brain will have been rested; sleepy thoughts will have 
been roused, brought back to life and made to engender others. The 
same after a visit to Shakespeare. 

Private benefactors, or the State, offer to studious youths the means 
of making a stay in Rome or Athens, or of journeying around the 
world. The belief is that they will return stronger, better armed for 
life, having had unusual occasions to think and consider, to store their 
mind. Such journeys are offered us by Shakespeare, around that 
microcosm, so full of wonders, and which has no secret for him, man's 
soul and character. 

His hold both on artists and on the masses will certainly continue; 
on artists on account of the example given by him of taking one's 
stand in realities, of looking at things straight, of observing nature 
rather than conforming to accepted traditions. This he does in 
absolute simplicity, without any touch of the pedantry of either the 
learned writer who worships rules because they are accepted, or the 
rebel who rejects them altogether, and on all occasions, because they 
are rules. 

In Claude Lorrain's canvases we have nature, plus Claude Lorrain; 
in Shakespeare's plays we have nature, plus Shakespeare, plus his 
public. Discarding what is not his but has been contributed by his 
public, we find that what he adds to nature does not consist in any 
undue intrusion of his personality, but, on the contrary, in artistically 
selecting from real life what is characteristic of the individual he 
represents. One might follow, step by step, a Hamlet, a nurse, a 
Falstaff in real life and note every word they say, every attitude they 
take; and the portrait would be less life-like than the one drawn by 
Shakespeare. There are moments when we do not look like ourselves : 
such moments are often selected by photographers, for which cause so 
many photographs made after us are not like us. The true artist 



22 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

is more discerning; he not only keeps his own personality apart from 
that of his personages, but in that of his personages he knows how 
to bring out what makes of them distinct individuals. That is his 
way of saying, Look. Boswell's portrait of Dr. Johnson is immortal 
simply because it was drawn in that manner. 

As a trammel-breaker, Shakespeare, who played a unique role in 
that French romantic movement, the chief result of which was the 
awakening of French lyricism — Shakespeare who was, said Emerson, 
'the father of German literature' — will continue to help and inspire 
future generations of artists. Every successful new attempt usually 
degenerates into a school : to imitate the successful is ever held by the 
many as the shortest road to success. Old rules are periodically 
scorned and discarded; then, after a brief moment of independence, 
the new attempt (invariably made in the name of nature) is systema- 
tized, and new rules, new shackles, replace the former ones; barnacles 
retard the movement of the ship. 

To look directly at nature; to see how Shakespeare looks at nature, 
to understand the amplitude of his realism, which does not, under 
pretence that nettles are real, discard roses; to read the parts of his 
plays which are really his, and study, for example, some of his wonder- 
ful first scenes (Romeo, Othello, Hamlet, Tempest, &c), will be, on 
such occasions, the best of cures. Human nature will have to change 
before the great trammel-breaker ceases to fulfil his mission. 

With the masses an increase of Shakespeare's influence is to be 
foreseen. His plays, in their ensemble, were ever accessible to the 
many, since it was for them especially that he wrote, but the higher 
beauties in his works, those which he put in simply because he could 
not help it, because they were commanded by his nature and not 
because they were required by that of his hearers, will be more and 
more understood and enjoyed. 

The change in our own days has been striking; it will be greater 
hereafter, when owing to discoveries, to the improvement of machin- 
ery, to a change in the conditions of life, the many will at last enjoy 
that chief one among the great causes of content in life, which the few 
now possess and the masses do not — leisure hours. For the many, as 
for the privileged of previous times, life will be less encumbered with 
matter; there will be, in their day's twenty -four hours, time for rest, 
for study, for a friendly book, for thoughts. Instruction and educa- 
tion, kindly given as it will be (else of little advantage), will prepare 
them for the best use to be made of the new treasure with highest 
enjoyment and profit. Many, of course, as is often the case with the 
possessors of treasure, will squander theirs, but some will not, and 



WHAT TO EXPECT OF SHAKESPEARE' 23 

their number will probably go on increasing. One of those highest 
enjoyments will be a better understanding of beauty, whether natural 

or artistic, a real sunset or a painted one. 

Signs are not lacking that the influence tor good of things of 
beauty, as such, will grow, and be more and more generally taken into 
account. A recent incident in far-off Colorado may be quoted as 
symptomatic. A commercial company there wanted, last year, to 
divert to its uses a stream which formed a cascade further down; it 
pleaded that it had, according to the Constitution, 'the right to divert 
waters of any natural stream unappropriated to beneficial uses.' 
Just as if it had taken its cue from Portia, the United States Circuit 
Court decided that 'The world delights in scenic beauty. ... It is 
therefore held that the maintenance of the vegetation in Cascade 
Canyon by the flow and seepage and mist and spray of the stream 
and its falls, as it passes through the canyon, is. a beneficial use of 
such waters wdthin the meaning of the Constitution.' Thus, with the 
full support of public opinion, the stream was saved as being a thing 
of beauty, an honest one, and therefore beneficial. 

The Palace at Versailles has been transformed, as you know, into 
a Museum dedicated 'A toutes les gloires de la France.' A visit 
there is for us what a reading of Henry V is for you. On Sundays 
the crowd is such that it is difficult to move: a crowd of the 
same sort that filled Shakespeare's theatre: artisans, shopkeepers, 
soldiers, sailors, servants, peasants come to town, and there too, now 
and then, a stray Ambassador. Such people are the best public, the 
most sincere, the one that does not look for occasions to blame and 
sneer, but occasions to admire, and few T things are more beneficial 
than disinterested admiration for great deeds and noble sights. 
Leaving the palace once, at the hour of closure, I stood near a couple 
of obviously very poor and very tired people. They had been looking 
for hours, and they were gazing still. 'Now you must go,' repeated 
the Keeper for the second time. I wish I could render the 
tone and expression with which they answered: 'Must we now? 
What a pity. It was all so beautiful.' Like every man leaving with 
regret Shakespeare's works after having admired what is highest and 
truest in them, those two surely went home better people. 

Let us not expect from Shakespeare what he cannot give, what he 
can is enough, and is of peerless value. Having come young to town, 
hard pressed by necessity, writing with very practical ends in view, 
never thinking of posterity, bound to please his public, the means of 
success he employed were in a way forced upon him by circumstances. 



"M 3 !«j. 



24 FIRST ANNUAL SHAKESPEARE LECTURE 

He knew what ingredients his public liked, and never felt it his duty 
to grudge them their pleasure; he could write, and had to write, with 
extreme rapidity, without any preparatory study or verifying; and 
he did so without scruple. But no less fully did he allow free play to 
that unparalleled genius of his, the extent of which was unsuspected 
by his contemporaries and by himself. 

By the problems he obliges us to consider, the concrete moral of 
some of his plays, their general healthy tone, the sympathies he 
awakens in our hearts, the amount of beauty he offers to our gaze, as 
varied as the world itself — by all this he renders us the one great 
service of drawing us out of our paltry selves, of busying us, not 
superficially, but intensely, with something other than our own in- 
terests. He raises us above the plane of everyday thoughts, he 
improves us by fighting in us the ever-recurring danger of our native 
egoism. 

'How does it profit me? ' Emerson had said; 'what does it signify? 
It is but a Twelfth Night, or Midsummer-Night's Dream, or a Winter 
Evening's Tale?' Let Emerson answer Emerson, for the same 
thinker had said elsewhere : ' All high beauty has a moral element 
in it.' 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



NOV 3 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



014 068 062 ft 



y 



